Re: A new manual

[gnwiii@gmail.com]

On 9/28/06, John R. Culleton <john@wexfordpress.com> wrote:

> What is needed now for greater acceptance of Context is not new
> features but a new manual, perhaps a multi volume set with a
> common index. The 2001 manual is great, but many of the features
> discussed daily here are not in it. One must chase around the
> wiki and the individual manuals like "details", and that is not
> satisfactory from the point of view of the new user. Most of us
> have memorized the locations of key information but newcomers
> have not.

I don't agree that lack of a current manual is a big problem for
potential users of ConteXt. In my experience, the biggest problem is
with the 3rd party tools (perl, ghostscript, ruby) on Win32 and legacy
commercial unix (where ruby is not provided and the system perl will
be a very old version).

You can write simple LaTeX documents without working 3rd party tools
(MikTeX-2.5 seems to provide ghostscript), but you need perl and ruby
before you can format anything in ConTeXt.  There should be some tools
to check the functioning and versions of ghostscript, perl, and ruby.
A VMWare player appliacance might be helpful for people with current
Win32 systems (e.g., ample CPU, disk, and RAM).

> If a consolidated manual set were offered for sale there would be a
> lot of customers. Or an abridged version, something like the
> 1999 Excursion manual but expanded and updated, would be a
> possibility.

Any printed manual will soon become stale.  What is needed is an
introductory manual
for new users together with an ongoing process to provide current
information.  The wiki is a good start, but there needs to be more
effort to ensure that the sources can be used as the definitive
manual.  The introductory manual should devote considerable space to
explaining how to find current information in the wiki and or using
the source files.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia